Same as the technology used on online stores and signup pages that secure connectivity, SSL encryption can protect your privacy in two ways.

First it protects you against login and password theft. And second, by encrypting the data when it leaves your provider's servers and enabling your newsreader to decrypt the data when it is downloaded, SSL encryption lets you upload and download in anonymity.

But there's one more bonus to using SSL. Since the encryption blinds your ISP from knowing that you're using Usenet, it is no longer able to throttle your bandwidth through a practice called traffic-shaping. (In order to increase the speeds for everyone on the network ISP sometimes cut down bandwidth used by high bandwidth customers). If they can't cut down your bandwidth, you'll be able to download even faster.

So we highly recommend paying the extra few bucks for SSL encryption!